Links in the chain
by cricketjeff on June 10, 2009. © Jeff Green, All rights reserved
There’s alanine and arginine
And glutanine, aspartic acid
Isoleucine and plain leucine
A list that makes me flat and placid
Remembering the lot would be
A far too boring task for me
Amino acids, as a group
Are really quite a motley troupe
The term just means a molecule
Whose functionality is dual
Carboxyl group and amine too
Means they have many tasks to do
They join to form in complex chains
The proteins that all life contains
Our cells are made from twenty two
Which really seems a lot too few
We have this stuff called RNA
Which shows these bricks the way to lay
There’s tyroline and tryptophan
And histidine and proline too
Selenocysteine joined the clan
I can’t recall them all, can you?
Remembering the lot would be
A far too boring task for me
The foods we eat contain the list
And none of them are safely missed
Amino acids on their own
Are foods most folk would leave alone
But joined to make a leg of lamb
Or flavouring a pound of jam
They make the prospect very sweet
Of finding something good to eat
Some biochemists spend each day
Aligning them some special way
To find the cure for all our ills
Which they can put in coloured pills
Or trying hard to find out why
They join up wrong and make us die
Amino acids one by one
A most peculiar source of fun
Pyrrolysine’s now in the list
Glutamic acid and the rest
There’s many more that I have missed
So Google them don’t be a pest!
Remembering the lot would be
A far too boring task for me
Author notes
Option #4: {Maybe Impossible?}
a. Write a poem on Amino Acids.
English